Education, Discipline, and Growth Theme Analysis

In Immaculée’s family, education is extremely important. Both her parents are teachers and encourage their children to be extremely diligent in their studies, providing the children with extra instruction and supervision on their homework. Immaculée is an ambitious, intelligent, and disciplined young woman, and she excels academically. This opens up opportunities for her to attend the very best educational institutions in Rwanda, experience independence at a young age, and lay the foundations for an impressive career. Yet despite Immaculée’s own hard work and talent, her education is blighted by both institutional and informal prejudice and discrimination against Tutsis. Over the course of the book, she learns that while education may be affected by ignorance and hatred, it is also one of the best solutions to the problem of prejudice and can help people to survive in extremely difficult situations. While Immaculée’s primary focus in the book is the power of love, faith, and forgiveness to get people through the most difficult of times, education and discipline are also shown to have a transformative impact on individuals and society, and to be beacons of hope for a better world.

In some ways, Immaculée presents her educational success as natural and easy. She always loved studying, and was eager to obey her parents’ wishes for her to be a star student. Indeed, just as Immaculée always had a natural enthusiasm for religion, so, too, did she wholeheartedly embrace education. As a result, when she is fifteen years old, Immaculée finishes the eighth grade with an average grade of 94%, which she notes is “more than enough to ensure a scholarship and placement in one of the best public high schools in the region.” At this age, she dreams of attending university and being a pilot, a professor, or a psychologist. Although she is only from a small village, her discipline and educational success indicate that she will be able to achieve anything she puts her mind to. Indeed, Immaculée is eventually accepted into the Lycée de Notre Dame d’Afrique, one of the best schools in the country, and into the National University in Butare, where she is awarded a scholarship. At every turn, Immaculée achieves more and more academic honors and thus, from a certain perspective, her educational success looks rather easy.

Despite her own hard work, Immaculée’s education is marred by prejudice and discrimination. As early as elementary school, one of her teachers, Buhoro, makes the students identify themselves by their ethnicity and scolds Immaculée when she admits that she doesn’t know whether she is Tutsi or Hutu. Later, when Immaculée is accepted to the Lycée, she does not receive the scholarship to which her grades entitle her because she is Tutsi. Finally, the genocide itself begins when Immaculée is on Easter break from college. When she eventually returns to Butare after the genocide ends, she finds the university destroyed. Prejudice and violence thus cast a shadow over Immaculée’s entire educational career. Even as her own talent, hard work, and discipline propel her to academic success, Immaculée cannot escape the impact of prejudice, which blights her educational journey.

Despite the destructive impact of prejudice, however, education ultimately helps Immaculée to survive the genocide and to rebuild her life in its aftermath. Perhaps the most pertinent example of this comes with Immaculée’s decision to teach herself English while she is confined to Pastor Murinzi’s bathroom. She realizes that many of the Tutsi rebels who are fighting their way through the country have been living in Uganda, and that they therefore speak English. She realizes that if the rebels succeed in defeating the government, speaking English will help her to get a good job, and she even has a vision of herself working at the UN. Immaculée’s extraordinary talent and discipline allow her to teach herself English in the bathroom using only the Bible and a dictionary. As predicted, this helps her to build a successful life after the genocide and even realize her dream of working at the UN.

Through her discipline and dedication to education, Immaculée is able to keep learning even in the most difficult situation imaginable, hiding for her life in the midst of a genocide. This remarkable fact emphasizes that, with discipline and determination, education and growth are always possible. In this way, the book presents knowledge and self-betterment as sources of hope—beacons of light in the darkness of ignorance.